The government’s concerns with online gambling

Online gambling has taken off like a rocket heading to the skies since the years of its creation. Many governments around the world have had problems and objections with regards to legalising online gambling in their countries. There are many reasons why a government would make online gambling illegal or at the very least put very strict restrictions on it. Some want to keep control of their countries, some believe more in the negative effects of such an activity than the good effects, while other simply want to regulate whatever online gambling is happening within their countries themselves. Whatever the case, most of these reasons do stem from the very same roots.

Addiction

The first and most prominent objection to online gambling is the drastically increased possibility of addiction that it comes with. Unlike land casinos, online casinos are very easily accessible and very easy to hide. This firstly makes it easy for people to become addicted if they can carry their casinos around with them and secondly makes it even easier to hide the addiction. Evidently, the socio-economic effects of a country being home to thousands of online gambling addicts could be devastating.

The country’s economy

Where a country’s government is concerned, one of the biggest problems with online gambling is that it is international and thus uncontrollable by the government. This is in direct contrast of land casinos which are under the direction and regulation of the country in which they are in. This scenario poses a threat to the economy of the country because it gives rise to a situation where money is leaving the country and none coming in through the i-gambling industry. For example, very few online casinos are based in Britain, however, hundreds of thousands of people from Britain gamble online each year. These people are giving their money to the international online casinos in exchange for chips to play at the casinos. That is money leaving the country. The online casinos then get taxed on their earnings within the countries in which they are based regardless of how many people from other countries contributed to those earnings. This way, the British government loses out significantly.

Miscellaneous

On a much smaller but still relevant scale, online gambling has the ability to make people lazy. One of the things that people are so fond of about gambling online is the fact that one does not even need to get out of bed in order to engage in a round of online Poker. Overtime, a continued trend of this kind of thinking breeds behaviour that is not to the standards of the hardworking, productive and self-respecting societies that governments want for their people.

Other than this, online gambling opens a wider market for online fraudsters to operate. Yes online casinos should have fraud prevention systems in place, but credit card fraud, identity theft, hacking and other online crimes are easier to be accomplished when there are hundreds and thousands of people available to perform them on.

Additionally, there have been numerous cases of people playing online using other people’s identities. Although online casinos do in fact do their best to stop such people from claiming anything or continuing to play at the casinos, the threat of identity theft is still a valid one. In other instances, people under the legal gambling age have been caught playing online whether using an older person’s identity or playing freely using the free play modes where no sign up is required